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> Users can move to other instances on Mastodon without tremendous effort Moving instances is unnecessary friction. I don't care if you qualify it as tremendo

> Users can move to other instances on Mastodon without tremendous effort Moving instances is unnecessary friction. I don't care if you qualify it as tremendous or not > and it seems like your main beef, about some admin limiting what you can see by capriciously de-federating left and right seems to be primarily hypothetical. What a disingenuous comment. You went from "have surveyed the 200k instances" to "it's hypothetical then". No. It has already happened in a few of the instances recommended on Reddit. It happened in the first 2 I created accounts for. > Why wouldn’t one start out on a pretty open, well-connected instance, follow whomever they want (‘constructing what you want to see’), and defer worrying until/unless some actual admin actions bother you? I was following one that I thought was more open than the initial one I found myself in and suddenly it wasn't and the argument of some users was "of course the admin can defederate at any point for vague reasons" > Second, users absolutely can run their own instance for full control over federation decisions, which is, while out of reach for normies, well in the capability of most HN readers such as yourself. I'm also capable of hosting my own email and plenty other things but it's unnecessary effort for the value. It really is amazing how after disingenuous takes I get a ridiculous appeal to geekdom or something. > I’m not even saying Mastodon or Lemmy is a good replacement for Reddit! It’s quite different and I think a Reddit-like thing offers way better threaded discussions, and find sorting through Twitter-style reply chains far, far worse than upvoted comments! But I’m still puzzled by the critiques you’ve chosen on the fediverse. You're puzzled because you're unwilling to read them for what they are and instead produce strawmen in order to deny they are a reality. Mastodon works for you. Great. But my points stand and are in no way rebuked by your "it's hypothetical", "wait, it's easy", wait, it's not easy but a HN type should do it.

xp84 3y ago
I wasn't trying to rebuke you. I was just genuinely confused because I haven't ever seen such drama go down at all. I just use mastodon the way I used to use twitter, which is to say, i scroll through it every now and then and see posts by my favorite podcast hosts. Most of them are on mastodon.social and most of the rest have self-hosted instances of their own. Nobody's defederated anybody amongst these instances that I know of, so I wasn't aware it was a big problem on the mainstream instances. Anyway, clearly the "Fediverse" doesn't work for you. Okay. All these platforms have downsides, and unless one's willing to go all the way to DIY kind of stuff, yup, we're going to be subject to the whims of someone we hope will be generally benign in their actions. LMK if you discover a way around that.

xp84 3y ago

I wasn't trying to rebuke you. I was just genuinely confused because I haven't ever seen such drama go down at all. I just use mastodon the way I used to use twitter, which is to say, i scroll through it every now and then and see posts by my favorite podcast hosts. Most of them are on mastodon.social and most of the rest have self-hosted instances of their own. Nobody's defederated anybody amongst these instances that I know of, so I wasn't aware it was a big problem on the mainstream instances. Anyway, clearly the "Fediverse" doesn't work for you. Okay. All these platforms have downsides, and unless one's willing to go all the way to DIY kind of stuff, yup, we're going to be subject to the whims of someone we hope will be generally benign in their actions. LMK if you discover a way around that.